Last week I attended the UNITY journalism conference in Las Vegas, and during my stay I ingested more than 9,000 tweets that had the #UNITY12 hashtag. This line chart shows how the traffic ebbed and flowed each day:

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Dozens of technologists and journalists today descended on Google’s beautiful Mountain View, Calif., campus for a discussion about technology and journalism. The conference, organized by the Center for Investigative Reporting, led to some prolific tweeting, as one might expect.

I used a simple script to ingest the 1,500-plus tweets with the search API into a sqlite database. This chart, made with Google Docs’ chart tools (when in Rome…), shows the top 25 most prolific tweeters (as of 4:30 p.m. pacific) who used the #techraking and #techrakingcir hash tags.

Congrats, Ian Hill, you top the list (which includes, I think, some spammers):

This is just a quick chart made in a rush. Feel free to download and check out the pipe-delimited data for yourself: #techraking | #techrakingcir. Send me your visualizations or thoughts, and I’ll post ‘em here. See the full list of Twitter user counts here.

Following Nathan Yau’s excellent tutorial for creating heat maps with time series data (he used vehicle accidents by day for a year), I visualized 3,559 of my tweets back to March 2009.

These maps, created with a modified R script from the tutorial, show how often I sent tweets (both personal and RT), with darker shades representing more activity. It’s fun to go back to the dark days and recall what sparked flurries of tweets:

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This is an oldie, but a goodie: A color-coded chart that helps decipher the Twitter API, created by the company’s platform services lead, Rafﬁ Krikorian. Each color represents a different field of data created each time you tweet. All this data is available to developers to build cool stuff like TweetStats, Klout and the like: